The January 6 Committee geared up to deliver a potential bombshell on Tuesday with emergency testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows. But like most of the attempts to take down former president Donald Trump — from Russian collusion hoaxes to slimy porn lawyers — Hutchinson’s testimony quickly revealed itself as too good to be true.
It quickly became clear that one of Hutchinson’s most shocking claims was either misremembered or an outright lie. She claimed that Tony Ornato, White House deputy chief of staff for operations, and Bobby Engel, who headed Trump’s security detail, told her that Trump had attempted to grab the steering wheel of a Secret Service vehicle to redirect it to the Capitol on January 6. When agents refused, Trump allegedly assaulted them.
Secret Service sources said that both the driver of the vehicle and Engel had heard this allegation for the first time during Hutchinson’s testimony and were prepared to testify under oath that it was not true. Fox News reported that a source close to Ornato said he was similarly shocked to hear Hutchinson’s account and would also confirm it was not true. A spokesperson for the Secret Service said that the January 6 Committee didn’t even bother to reach out to them to confirm the story before having Hutchinson testify publicly on Tuesday.
If Hutchinson was able to get such a major allegation so totally wrong, how are we supposed to trust the rest of her testimony?
The answer, of course, is that we can’t. Hutchinson also testified that she wrote a note offering a potential statement for President Trump to release during the Capitol riot. Former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann said that was also a lie… because he was the one who wrote the note — and had told the committee so during his own testimony.
Nonetheless, the “conservative” clapping seals who are always not-so-secretly rooting for Trump’s demise insisted that Hutchinson’s allegations were disqualifying — if not proof of criminality.
A high-resolution photo of Hutchinson being sworn in graced the cover of the Wall Street Journal this morning. Readers weren’t informed that the Secret Service was prepared to reject parts of her testimony until ten paragraphs into the story.
The Washington Examiner editorial board insisted that the testimony proved that Trump was “unfit for power” because he was “unstable” and “unmoored,” repeating uncritically the story of “the president trying to grab the wheel of the car to force it to be driven to the Capitol and then violently reaching for the neck of Secret Service agent Bobby Engel.”
Andy McCarthy included more skepticism in his National Review piece about Hutchinson’s testimony, but the outlet still ran with the headline, “Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony against Trump Is Devastating.”
The fact that the most salacious allegations from the January 6 Committee’s star witness were not the product of eyewitness accounts should have invited immediate skepticism. Instead, the “walls are closing in!” crowd swallowed the testimony wholesale.
This kind of error could have been avoided if the January 6 Committee were a genuine investigatory body that provided rights to the minority party. However, it is clear that this entire endeavor is not a fact-finding mission, but an attempt to throw spaghetti — er, ketchup — at the wall and hope some of it sticks to Trump.
If past Trump “scandals” are any indication, it will end with even more egg on the face of his accusers.
